In these times when the federal government is distributing
massive amounts of cash, it’s shocking how little attention has
been paid to any trace of accountability or performance
testing.

During the bailout phase, financial institutions were literally
handed hundreds of millions of dollars without any clear
instructions about what they were supposed to do with the money.
It’s not clear if this was by design and it’s not clear what was
accomplished. It is clear that the money is gone.

The stimulus phase is only a slightly more controlled. While
throwing bushels of money into a giant fan might get the economy
moving again, it seems that specific objectives are completely
missing.

Ours is a consumer-based economy, which relies on large numbers
of people having enough extra money to spend easily, and the
confidence to spend it.

At this point, the primary objective of any stimulus plan should
be to keep people working. Once layoffs occur, the effects ripple
through the entire economy, making any comeback much more
difficult.

So, it is truly surprising that the federal stimulus doesn’t
contain provisions limiting layoffs by government subdivisions and
rewarding businesses that limit layoffs.

While we may have reached the point of no return, there still
may be something that state and local government could try that
might save us from economic disaster.

At this point, most state and local agencies should still be
able to prevent almost all layoffs by making substantial cuts in
the pay of their highest paid employees.

Our economy is out of whack, as it was in 1929, in that the gap
between the richest and poorest is huge. Such gaps are demoralizing
and socially destructive.

Some of this inequity has spilled over into public employment. A
few years ago, the Arizona Legislature gave a percentage increase
to all university employees. I was later stunned to find that the
president’s increase was more than the entire yearly salary of
thousands of university employees.

Public employees are being traumatized by threats of layoffs.
But the University of Arizona, for example, has more than 1,200
employees who receive more than $100,000 per year. Few, if any, of
them are facing layoffs. Such employees should bear their fair
share of the pain and ask not what their state can do for them, but
what they can do for society.

If all Arizona public employees’ salaries are reduced according
to a strongly progressive formula, we should be able to operate
with no government layoffs at all. That would be stimulus we could
believe in for our state.

It would be necessary to do some adjusting at the high end, but
a basic formula that would appear to work at this stage would be to
reduce pay by 2 percent for every $10,000 of pay.

So, employees who earn $30,000 would be cut 6 percent and those
who earn $100,000 would be cut 20 percent, certainly leaving enough
to live on. And not nearly as economically damaging as having lower
level employees lose their jobs completely.

In addition to preventing layoffs, which would be good for
everyone, such a plan could drive some creative thinking.

We’d have to explain why somebody should get a million bucks to
teach kids to throw a ball around. If Arizona announced that no
coach could be paid more than, say, the average assistant
professor, the move would sweep across the country like a fresh
wind. The emperor has no clothes, and tuition-battered families
would rejoice.

We could do the same thing with the university presidents who
think that they’re CEOs with $500,000 pay, housing allowances, and
golden parachutes. Whack ‘em back to reality.

As a retired high school teacher, I defy anyone to explain
clearly why any high school administrator deserves to be paid much
more than the average teacher. Make that adjustment and we would be
able to keep and hire the teachers we need to get class size
down.